On Mon, Oct 06, 2025 at 02:17:33PM -0400, Sasha Levin wrote:
From: Nathan Chancellor nathan@kernel.org
[ Upstream commit d87208128a3330c0eab18301ab39bdb419647730 ]
'-mpreferred-stack-boundary' (the GCC option) and '-mstack-alignment' (the clang option) have been supported in their respective compilers for some time, so it is unnecessary to check for support for them via cc-option. '-mpreferred-stack-boundary=3' had a restriction on '-mno-sse' until GCC 7.1 but that is irrelevant for most of the kernel, which includes '-mno-sse'.
Move to simple Kconfig checks to avoid querying the compiler for the flags that it supports.
Signed-off-by: Nathan Chancellor nathan@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Borislav Petkov (AMD) bp@alien8.de Link: https://lore.kernel.org/20250814-x86-min-ver-cleanups-v1-2-ff7f19457523@kern... Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin sashal@kernel.org
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## Backport Status: NO
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**Dependency Analysis:**
- Requires minimum GCC 8.1 for x86 (introduced in v6.15 via commit a3e8fe814ad1)
- Requires minimum Clang 15.0.0 for x86 (commit 7861640aac52b)
- Both requirements are satisfied in 6.17 stable tree (verified via scripts/min-tool-version.sh)
- GCC 7.1+ supports `-mpreferred-stack-boundary=3` with `-msse` (per GCC commit 34fac449e121)
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### Conclusion
While this commit is technically safe and provides a marginal build-time performance improvement by eliminating unnecessary runtime compiler checks, **it does not meet the fundamental requirement for stable kernel backporting**: it does not fix a bug that affects users.
The commit is purely a cleanup that removes obsolete code after compiler minimum version requirements were raised. Such cleanups belong in mainline development, not stable trees, which should focus exclusively on fixing bugs that impact users.
The fact that it was auto-selected by AUTOSEL does not override the documented stable kernel rules. This commit should be **rejected** from stable backporting or **reverted** if already applied.
Based on all of this, I would agree that it is not really suitable for backporting (at least not beyond 6.15, whereas the subject says back to 5.4), so why was this still sent for review?
Cheers, Nathan